The conflict in Sudan, I think, was entirely predictable. You have an army that has been in need of reform for more than a generation, and it has been attacked by a militia of its own creation, which carried out a genocide in Darfur 20 years ago. What brought them to this battle was an effort to reform both and incorporate them into one new national army.
We could have seen this coming, I think, from much further away. We didn't take the steps, because I don't think there was an appropriate diplomatic coalition underpinning the negotiations that were going on between these two parties. They were left, in many respects, to their own devices to negotiate a way forward. Then, when there was little recourse but to fight, there was no one there to step in and prevent them from taking this step. I think there has been a lack of diplomatic attention leading up to this battle.
Of course, once the battle began, we were all caught a bit flat-footed. Most western embassies, in the early days of this conflict when we could have perhaps steered it on a different course, were all far too concerned with getting their own nationals and their own diplomats out of Sudan in the first two, three or four weeks of the fighting. When that happened, we lost our footing in the country. We lost our ability to impact decision-making by those leaders, and we have been in a diplomatic deficit ever since this conflict started.
We are only now beginning to try to gain back some momentum. There was a conference in Paris earlier this week. We reached the one-year anniversary.
We now have a special envoy from the United States. When I worked on Sudan 20 years ago, there were a dozen special envoys. There was a diplomatic tempo that was maintained over the course of many months. That is missing. I think many western countries have allowed gulf state actors to take on a greater role in trying not to mediate but to direct this conflict in ways that benefit their interests. We need to see a reassertion of western human rights values around this conflict going forward if we hope to see it come to a positive conclusion, not just for our own interests but for the interests of the Sudanese people.